This is a message from Patrick Volkerding in regards to his thoughts on Gnome and Slackware. It was originally posted on the Dropline Gnome Forum. Editor's note: Pat has made similar comments to me as well regarding Gnome's bugs and maintainance problems.

So yes, it's about half the packages, and if I understand correctly, this is just a basic gnome install. And what is installed should suffice for most of the programs that need gtk/gnome libraries. So the desktop layer is not that thin as someone suggested (and if we consider not just a basic working gnome install, than my figure of 1/3 can be more or less accurate).